Freefall 4K

Find yourself in a state of free-fall, lost in space,tumbling out of control in the orbit of our home planet, Earth.

I have always wondered what would it feel like to find myself lost in space.

From 2001: Space Odyssey to Gravity to ADR1FT, science-fiction media presented this scenario (often in first-person perspective) yet I could never feel like I truly experienced it. Now, with help of Virtual Reality, I am finally able to attempt and recreate the sensation – tumbling out of control in orbit of our home planet, Earth.

Freefall 4K is best experienced using high fidelity HMD (Head-Mounted Display) such as HTC Vive,Oculus Rift or GearVR. Google Cardboard offers a great entry-level budget option for anyone with a smartphone anyone.

You can download the high-quality video for local playback through a link below. If you’d rather watch the streaming version, make sure to set the video quality (gear icon) to at least 1440p.

The original 2015 Freefall was a rather quick exercise – I wanted to see how Octane Render performs with extreme quality textures (source Earth maps were in 16K and above). I needed to test the compositing workflow for stereoscopic VR – mainly unwrapping equirectangular animations to cube maps, adding vfx and then re-wrapping.

Finally, I wanted to give the camera a continuous rotating motion on all three axes to determine the range of speeds that are acceptable for VR viewing. In the end I feel I found a sweet spot where the motion is quite disorienting, yet does not induce nausea.

In late 2016 I decided to remaster this video, resulting in Freefall 4K – a new version of the original experience, improved in nearly every aspect. Special thanks to Noble Rot studios for lending me their render farm and making this project possible.

360° Stills

Unlike flat photos, 360° stills faithfully represent a slice of their original source, allowing viewers to experience a micro-moment of the larger piece. You may view them dragging with your mouse or finger to look around.

Technical details

Freefall 4K was animated and rendered in OTOY Octane Render and mastered in Stereoscopic Equirectangular 4K (4096x4096px) at 60fps. Editing and compositng was done in Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. Original satellite imagery by NASA Visible Earth. Rendered using Noble Rot render farm.